


The Mission Worth Fighting For

by quodthey



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Green Lantern (Comics)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Temporary Amnesia, can be read both ways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 17:04:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21165110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quodthey/pseuds/quodthey
Summary: The one where Harry Jordan and Bruce Wayne wake up in a hotel with only a couple of wallets, some weird things they don't think they want, and no idea who they are.There is only one bed.





	The Mission Worth Fighting For

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to audreycritter for listening to me complain about this for a very long time and for being extremely funny, and to Flute for catching all my dumb typos <3 
> 
> this exists mostly as a vehicle for increasingly dumber jokes, please do not try to find ""plot"" here.

When he forced his eyes open, the world was spinning: a kaleidoscope of colours and images swimming in his eyes. 

“Can you hear me?” someone asked. A man leaned over him, but all he could make out in the haze were his blue eyes and dark hair. He groaned, and let his eyes fall closed again. 

“Wake up,” he heard him say, but it was so far away and his eyes were so heavy. “Come on, stay awake.” 

He didn’t remember falling asleep or passing out or whatever it was that had happened, but when he finally came to, the world wasn’t spinning and nobody was leaning over him. There was soft fabric under his hands and when he turned his head, he rolled it across a frankly ridiculously soft pillow. 

He didn’t know why ‘I’m not going to puke’ felt like it should be a momentous occasion, but it did. Things were good.

Well. Except for: he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t know who he was. 

Those two things? Yeah, they could have been better.

Really, though? He just wanted to go back to sleep.

#

When he was finally able to keep his eyes open for more than a second at a time, he realised that he was not alone in the room. He almost felt like that should be a problem, but maybe because of who the other person was, it wasn’t: from what he could see, it was the man from before he passed out. Or fell asleep. He was hoping it was more of the former than the latter, really. It felt less embarrassing. 

The other person was a man with dark hair and a serious face, and he looked torn between locking himself in the bathroom and climbing out of a window. 

The room itself seemed absurdly nice. The bed was soft, and he had more pillows than a single human could possibly need. To one side of the bed were tall windows and doors lying open to a balcony. It was the sort of room, he thought, that you would see in a magazine of places you would never be able to afford to stay in, or in a movie where everyone is rich and beautiful. 

The other guy was sitting on a couch in the far corner watching the television play the news but the channel didn’t exactly help with the  _ Where In The World Am I? _ game he was playing in his head. 

“Hi,” he said, sitting up on the bed, and instantly hating himself for sounding dumb as his voice cracked. 

The man tore his eyes from the screen and turned to stare at him. “Hello,” he said flatly. 

Well, it was a little less than friendly but he hadn’t been murdered yet, and as far as he could tell he still had all his organs. That was a good sign. 

“So! Not to sound, uh, crazy or anything,” he said, a nervous laugh burbling up inside him. “But do you by any chance know where we are or who I am?” 

The other man kept staring at him, before looking away and sighing. “No,” he said eventually. “I was hoping you did.” 

“Oh, boy.” 

He leaned his head back on the unnecessarily plush headboard and resolutely didn’t cry, which to him and therefore to anybody with compassion was honestly very impressive, given that his co-amnesiac was currently giving off very strong  _ I will destroy you and everything you love _ vibes, which was not something that someone wanted to encounter immediately upon waking in a new place. He breathed in deeply. 

“Okay!” he said, aiming for the sure and confident tone of  _ everything is fine and I am fine and absolutely not panicking _ . He didn’t think he reached his target. He fell somewhere around the more honest and alarming  _ everything is very bad and I am trying my best, please don’t kill me _ . “Okay. This could be better. Uh. Let’s think of ways to make this better. How… did we get here? Any ideas?” 

He swung his legs off the bed and stood up quickly—too quickly, he realised, when his shaky legs led to him almost becoming close friends with the floor before he grabbed the bedside table. 

Ideas. Ideas. 

He personally didn’t have any. Or rather he did, but he didn’t think “aliens” was a good sane answer that someone would possibly believe, and although neither of them even knew their own names he didn’t think either of them were the sort to try weird new drugs in dodgy places, so that ruled out most of his ideas. 

“We must have been together,” the man said, in the tone of someone pointing out that the sky was blue. 

“Together?” he repeated, woozy. 

“Whatever this is, it’s likely only affecting the two of us,” he gestures at the TV. “There’s no reports of—mass amnesia.” 

Huh. Well, weren’t they special. He would like to be a little less special. 

“Huh,” he said out loud, intelligently. “So maybe we were hanging out. Oh, maybe we’re brothers!” 

“No,” the man said, decisively. It didn’t come across as rude as it could have been, because he followed it up by looking him up and down with that intense stare of his and saying slowly but with the same certainty he seemed to do everything with, “Not brothers. Partners, maybe. Hm.” 

_ Huh _ . Well. 

“Only one bed in the room,” he said, nodding. “Why else would we have gotten a single room? So yeah, we must have been together. That makes way more sense than aliens.” 

The man’s face flattened, and he seemed suddenly exhausted. It was painfully, uncomfortably familiar. “You thought what.” Even the weary tone was known to him. Maybe they were partners. 

“Nothing,” he said hastily. “Moving on.”

There was a look in the other man’s eyes that said that the aliens thing was  _ not _ going to pass without comment and that they  _ would _ be talking about it, but he graciously allowed him to push the conversation away toward something less embarrassing.

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he continued, overly courteously. “But it seems that neither of us knows who we are.” 

“I noticed,” the man said, because apparently he was also a killjoy who couldn’t let a joke pass. 

“Anyway, we’ll need to find something with our names, so—” 

“Driver’s license. Passport. Any sort of ID,” said the other man instantly, with the air of someone who had done this a thousand times before and could probably do it in their sleep and do it better than you. 

He didn’t argue with him because of the attitude and the aforementioned danger vibes, and because that was not an air you want to mess with without a good reason, so he glanced around the room for something that might have a clue. 

“To start with the obvious—one of us is called Jordan,” the man said, gesturing toward a brown leather jacket thrown over the back of a chair. “I think it might be you.” 

He (Jordan?) glanced down at what he was wearing—denims, a t-shirt. Clothes that were well worn and comfortable, and not at all like the exquisitely pressed and carefully looked after clothes of his... partner. The beat up jacket being his would make sense, so he crossed the room to where it had been abandoned and tried it on. It felt familiar, and important, but he didn’t know why. He moved to close it, then stopped, and let it fall open again. 

“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets and rolling his shoulders. “That feels right.” 

There was nothing else left sitting out in the open for them because that would be too easy, but tucked neatly away in the wardrobe were two bags. 

“Going to assume that one’s mine,” Jordan said, gesturing at the canvas bag that looked as if it had seen the end of the world and had come back to tell the tale. The other case in the room was black and shiny and somehow, even if he knew that it was ten years old, it would still look brand new to him. It perfectly matched the High Quality All Black theme the other man had going on.

The belongings tucked away inside the battered bag told almost the same story. A pair of jeans, faded and well worn, boots that are obviously looked after but not anywhere near new. He didn’t bother searching through the rest of it, instead heading straight for a side pocket, inside which he found a wallet. 

“Thank you,” he offered up to the universe. 

The—oh, long expired—driver’s license had his face on it so he was going to take a leap of faith and trust it. Trusting it meant that he trusted that his name was Harold. It didn’t feel right exactly, but nothing about the situation really did. 

“Well?” asked the other man. 

“Jordan, like you said. Harold Jordan, apparently,” said the newly re-christened Harold. Or maybe it was just newly christened. He didn’t know if he had a christening, before. 

The man frowned at him. “You don’t look like a Harold.” 

“What does a Harold look like, exactly?” Harold asked, suddenly irritated. God. There were enough questions to ask without getting into  _ more.  _ He had to be Harold, it was on the card. His middle name was listed as Martin but that also didn’t seem right. Maybe he was a Harry? Harry Jordan. 

He could live with being Harry Jordan. 

The other man gave a slight shrug, apparently unconcerned that he had nearly tipped his probably-partner into an identity crisis. “Not sure,” he said. “But it’s not like we know a lot to start with. Harold.” 

“What about you?” he asked. “Find anything?” 

“According to this, I’m Bruce,” he said casually, holding the passport aloft. Harold envied the apparent ease with which he adopted the name. “Bruce Wayne.” He suited being a Bruce. 

#

The room was a nice one but the stationery bore a rather foreboding message of  _ DON’T LEAVE THE ROOM _ so Harry couldn’t really make himself comfortable. The hastily scrawled and not at all alarming message bore a post-script of  _ CALL DICK _ , which Harry squinted at for a moment before passing it over to his new co-amnesiac slash maybe boyfriend. 

“I think this is for you,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.” Not that anything did, really.

“This feels familiar,” Bruce said, frowning. 

Just as he suited being a Bruce, his face seemed made to suit frowning. He slid a slim black box from his jacket and something in Harry’s brain recognised it as a cell phone. That, he thought, was the worst: that he knew what things were and could generally remember how they worked, but everything else was just—gone. A blank slate. 

(How did he know what a slate was? Again, _ hate. _ )

“Call,” Bruce said quietly. “How do—oh, yes. Of course.” 

His finger slid over something, and the plain black box lit up. 

“Hm,” he said. “Useful.” 

He fiddled with it, trying to get used to it, until Harry nudged him. “Hey,” he said, gesturing at Bruce’s case. “You mind if I check that while you’re figuring the phone out? Might save some time.” 

“Sure,” Bruce replied, not looking up. “Knock yourself out.” 

The clothes packed carefully away in Bruce’s case were more or less the same as what he was wearing—some nice shirts, turtlenecks, and what Harry assumed must be the usual stuff you keep ready for if you’re going to be travelling and/or stranded in a hotel room for an unknown amount of time. 

It was pretty boring, actually. 

He probably shouldn’t tell his probable-boyfriend that he’s boring. 

It was when he was packing the boring black, grey, and white clothes back into the case that he noticed it. The tiny little catches. Something about it… didn’t feel right. 

Bruce was scrolling on his phone with a frown on his face that Harry was beginning to think was his default face so he didn’t point it out to him. Instead, he carefully removed everything from the case again and set them aside. 

Harry gently pressed along the sides of the suitcase. Something clicked. It came apart. 

He froze.

Apparently Bruce wasn’t boring, after all. 

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, babe. We need to talk.” 

The words came to him naturally, so Bruce might have been right about the relationship, and Harry didn’t know how that changed the situation, but it did. 

“Hm?” 

“Please will you look at me and not your phone. We need to talk. Right now.” 

Bruce looked up. 

“Yeah so, remember how we don’t remember anything?” Harry asked, blankly. “I think I just remembered something for you. I think I just remembered that you might kill people.” 

He and Bruce stared down at the suitcase. Coincidentally, they also stared down at several wickedly sharp and oddly shaped knives, some rope, binoculars, and several darts filled with unpleasantly coloured liquid. 

“What,” Bruce said. 

“I think you might kill people,” Harry repeated. It felt something worth repeating, if only to try and make sense of it. Boring Bruce, killer at large. 

“Oh. Yes, that’s what I thought you’d said,” Bruce said, faintly. “Would it make a difference if I said I’ve never seen those before in my life?” 

Harry considered it. “Not really,” he said. “We haven’t seen most things before.” 

“Yes,” Bruce said, nodding. “That is the problem.” 

“So. That’s some news, at least.”

Bruce looked away from the hidden arsenal, glancing back at his phone. 

“I also have some news,” he said. “I think I know who Dick is.” 

Harry perked up, the change of topic jolting his mind away from running around in the same circle for hours. “Yeah? Friend or foe?” he asked, with a laugh. 

Bruce didn’t meet his eyes. 

“Given the chain of messages,” he said. “I believe he may be my boss.”

“What.” 

Bruce’s idea of what could possibly help in bad situations was very different from Harry’s, because he added: “I also think he may be a boss I don’t like.” 

“Well, yeah,” Harry agreed, without thinking. “You call him  _ dick _ .” 

Wait. “Hey,” he said, slowly. “So. Just spitballing here but. Maybe, and it’s just a maybe right now, but maybe if you do, uh, you know—” 

“Kill people,” Bruce said, flatly. 

“Yeah, so, if you  _ do  _ do that,” Harry continued, thankful he didn’t have to say the words. “Then maybe contacting your boss is something you might consider… not doing? Maybe? Just putting that out there.” 

Bruce frowned a slightly different frown. He thought about this for a moment longer than Harry thought it required. 

“I don’t think he’s expecting me to,” he said, eventually. “It seems I rarely reply to his… messages.” 

“That was a weird pause,” Harry said. 

Bruce, it seemed, had a catalogue of pauses and frowns, and every one of them had a subtly different meaning. It was remarkable what the human face could do without moving very much. 

He said nothing, his silence silently condemning Harry for not understanding the intricate nuance of his personal nonverbal vocabulary, but gave him his phone anyway. It was open on a chain of messages from a contact called only Dick. 

It was, it seemed, a one sided conversation, the most recent of which was an image. 

Harry stared at it. It was a can of what he knows is Coke with ‘Legend’ written on the side, and a bottle of milk. The caption read “I hope your day is…,” as if that made sense. The idea of there being a maybe-serial killer out there who sent dumb nonsensical messages like this threw him slightly off-kilter. 

“I hope your day is cokemilk?” he asked the room at large, baffled.

Bruce sighed. “I knew you were going to say that,” he said. “I hope your day is  _ legendary _ .” 

That made more sense, but Harry refused to admit defeat. “Thanks, honey,” he said, handing the phone back. “I hope your day is cokemilk, too.” 

Bruce closed his eyes. 

#

“So you kill people.” 

“We don’t know that for sure,” Bruce said. He had said it several times at this point, but Harry, busy pacing and catastrophising, wasn’t listening to him. 

“I’m dating a killer. Maybe a serial killer. We don’t know. We don’t know anything.” 

“Harry,” Bruce said, watching him cross the floor repeatedly. “You’re right. We don’t know anything. So we don’t know if I kill people.” 

Harry turned on his heel suddenly, pointing at the case. “We know!” he said, voice definitely not shrill. “We know something!” 

“We know that I have things,” said Bruce, soothingly. “We don’t know that I have to use them.” 

Harry blinked at him. “What?” 

Bruce leaned forward in his chair, hands clasped between his knees. “I don’t have to kill people,” he said, then faltered. “I. I don’t  _ want  _ to kill people. It—it doesn’t feel right.” 

“Oh.” Harry sat down next to him, heavily. “Oh. Okay, then.” 

“I mean. I might have killed people in the past,” Bruce said, but Harry interrupted him. 

“Going to stop you there,” he said. “I appreciate the whole honesty thing that’s happening here, but I don’t think I could keep dating someone who kills people. Or killed. So,” he clapped his hands together. “Let’s say it didn’t happen and it’s not going to happen, and pretend they aren’t there, yeah?” 

He grinned at Bruce, who looked back at him, solemn. 

“Alright,” Bruce said. “Nothing happened. They aren’t there.” He reached a hand across and rested it tentatively on Harry’s knee. “I can change,” he said. 

“I know,” Harry said. “I believe you.” 

They sat there like that, silently together for a moment, before Bruce stood. 

“We need a plan,” he said quietly. 

Harry looked up at him.

“If I had been—involved—with something like that,” he said. “People will likely come looking if I don’t come back.” 

“Okay,” Harry said slowly, not really seeing where he was going with this. 

“Maybe we should call this Dick and see what he wanted me to do,” Bruce said. 

Harry stared at him. “That’s not very cokemilk of you,” he said eventually, for lack of anything more coherent. 

“Oh my God.” 

“I’m just saying,” Harry continued, his brain kicking itself into gear. “You can’t switch between ‘I can change, I won’t kill anymore’ and ‘Let’s call my serial killer boss and see what the sitch is’ every five minutes. It’s not cool.” 

Bruce clenched his jaw and breathed out heavily. “Alright,” he said. “And what would you suggest?” 

“Uh,” Harry said. “Maybe we should check my stuff at some point?” 

“You haven’t already?” Bruce looked at him, incredulous. 

“Hey, we’ve been a bit busy,” Harry retorted. “There was a minor crisis over whether or not  _ you kill people _ .” 

“Well,” Bruce said quietly, mouth twisted minutely. “‘Nothing happened’ certainly lasted a long time.” 

Harry looked away, abashed. “Yeah,” he said, just as quiet. “Shouldn’t have said that. Sorry. I know you’re trying.” 

If Bruce could try, then so could he. He’d have to. There was nobody else who would understand. 

He heaved a sigh. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s try this again: maybe we should check through my stuff and see what secrets lurk there.” 

Bruce raised an eyebrow. Harry met his eyes. 

_ Come on _ , he thought. If he thought hard enough, then maybe Bruce would magically, through previously unknown psychic powers, be able to understand him. 

A moment felt like an eternity before Bruce nodded slowly, and the little movement felt like forgiveness. 

“Let’s,” he said. 

As one, they turned and looked at the bag. 

“Any guesses?” Harry asked. 

Bruce slanted a look at him. “Maybe you’re a cop,” he said dryly. “Chasing me across the country.” 

“Oh my  _ God _ ,” Harry said, temporarily blinded by dramatic possibilities. “That’d be so cool.” 

At Bruce’s look, he amended: “That would not be cool. That would be bad. Let’s hope that’s not it.” 

There wasn’t anywhere in the bag for sudden assassin surprises, so he felt safe pulling the zip and emptying everything onto the bed in one go. They were his things, after all, not Bruce’s. He wasn’t fancy. 

“Um,” he said. Perhaps dumping everything in one go was not the best idea he’d ever had. He reached between shirts and pulled something up. A magazine. A gun magazine. As in, for guns. 

“Um,” he repeated, holding it up. 

Bruce looked at him. “I’m going to assume there’s a gun in there, too,” he says. 

He nodded, because there was. Harry could see the butt of it. He didn’t think he wanted to touch it. 

“I’m also going to assume that there isn’t, for example, a badge in there?” 

There was not. 

“Alright,” Bruce said. “This is a complication.” 

“A comp—a  _ complication _ ? Are you kidding me?” Harry asked, growing angry. “You have your—weird knives and rope! I have a gun!” 

“Yes,” Bruce said. “I can see that.” 

“Bruce,” he said seriously, dread filling him. “I think we’re killers. I think we went to a lot of trouble to hide it. I think these might not even be our names.”

He paused. 

“Oh my God, what if we’re spies.” 

Bruce made a noise of disgust, turning away. 

“No, no, I’m serious,” Harry said, urgently. “What if that’s why we’re here? What if  _ I’m _ the killer here and you’re my handler?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bruce said instantly. “You’re too noisy to be an assassin.” Even as he said it, he looked perturbed that he had chosen that as his reasoning. “Besides,” he soldiered on. “Do you even know any other languages?” 

“I don’t know!” Harry cried. “I can’t remember anything! Do you?” 

Bruce scoffed. “Of course n—” he started, before cutting himself off and frowning. “Wait.” 

Harry’s eyes widened. “You do, don’t you?” 

“I—might.” It seemed difficult for him to admit. 

“We’re spies,” Harry said, light-headed. “We’re spies and we’re here to kill someone. We’re assassins.” 

“We don’t have to kill anyone,” Bruce reminded him. “Not if we don’t want to.” 

“Of course I don’t want to kill anyone,” Harry snapped. “Jesus, who do you think I am?” 

Bruce made a face at him, a perfect  _ do you realise what you just said _ face that Harry grimaced at. 

“Yes, I know,” he said. 

“We  _ might not be spies _ ,” Bruce said again. 

Harry waved at the suitcase hiding the arsenal. “Oh? Then please,  _ please  _ explain that.” 

Bruce faltered. “We might—be in the mob,” he offered.

“ _ How is that better _ .” 

It wasn’t. There was no way it was a better option, because there was no good explanation. 

Bruce sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed as Harry repacked his bag. 

“Do you think this is how we met?” Bruce asked eventually. 

“What?” 

“Well,” he said. “A lot of people meet at work.” 

“At work,” Harry repeated. “We might have met on a—job.” 

Bruce nodded. 

Meeting at work felt familiar, but not quite right. 

As he lifted a shirt to pack it away, something tumbled out from between the folds and fell to the floor. 

“What the hell?” he said quietly to himself, picking it up. A ring, small and green. He slid it onto his finger, instinct guiding him, and part of him wasn’t surprised that it fitted perfectly. 

“Hey,” he said, and reached for Bruce’s shoulder from behind. “Check this out.” 

But as his hand touched Bruce, the man reached out behind him—too quickly to be thinking about it, a well-honed instinct kicking in—twisting and pulling Harry into a hold. As he pulled, Harry threw out his own hand, and Harry in a split second of reality becoming unreal decided that whatever it was that got rid of their memories probably did a number on his sanity, too, because his clothes changed and suddenly he was simultaneously in his jeans and shirt  _ and  _ a skin-tight green and black costume.

There was a giant green shield between him and Bruce now, glowing bright. 

It was coming out of his ring. 

Harry was insane. 

That was the only explanation. 

“What the  _ hell _ ,” said Bruce, who could apparently also see the giant green ring shield and the magical girl costume change. He could swear he knew something once, about two people being mad together. Maybe that’s what this was. 

“I… was going to say that I didn’t know why I did that—why I reacted like that,” Bruce said slowly. “But I would also like to know how you’re doing that.” 

“I put on a ring,” Harry said. 

“You put on a ring.” 

“Do I have an echo?” Harry asked sharply. 

“Forgive me for not instantly understanding your magic ring,” Bruce said. 

Harry lowered his hand. The shield vanished. The clothes didn’t, until he actively thought about it.

“So,” he said after a moment. “That happened.” 

#

They called for room service, because Harry said, “You can’t be angry while you’re eating,” and through half-bitten off words and tense shoulders and deep breaths hiding snarls, it was clear that they were both pretty close to getting angry. 

He shoved a couple of fries into his mouth instead of speaking. 

“You’re right,” Bruce said. Harry liked the words and the certainty with which he said them, but he hadn’t said anything so he didn’t have a clue what exactly it was that he was right about. 

“I think we’re here to kill someone.” 

Harry choked on his fries. 

Oh. That thing that he was right about. 

“Jesus,” he wheezed. “Warn a guy.” 

“Sorry,” Bruce said, not sounding very sorry at all as he thumped him on the back. 

He sat back after Harry could breathe properly again. 

“Right,” Harry said. “What nonsense were you saying this time?” 

“I think we’re here to kill someone,” Bruce repeated dutifully. 

“Yeah,” Harry sighed. He fell back into the chair, head lolling. “Great news, wonderful, just what I wanted to hear. Come on then,” he said, waving at Bruce without looking at him. “Explain it to me.” 

Bruce hesitated, which was how Harry knew that he was going to hate whatever he said. 

“I’m not going to like this, am I?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. 

Without looking at him, Bruce said, “It’s not just that we’re here to kill someone. I think we’re here to kill each other.” 

There was a pause. “Hey,” Harry said weakly. “I was right. I really do not like that.” 

Although they had only known each other for a few hours, Harry couldn’t imagine wanting to kill Bruce. The thought of it made him feel sick. 

“Well,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to kill you. Presumably I love you.” 

Bruce looked at him, a ghost of a smile on his face. He didn’t say anything back, but he didn’t have to. 

They settled into their chairs and while Harry dove into his rapidly cooling food, Bruce continued to pick at his. Briefly Harry would think about the ring and about Bruce’s case and a terrible feeling of loss would well up inside him and he ate more fries and bit into his burger with more gusto. 

But eventually food is always gone, and eventually they were sitting in silence again, with no escape. 

Maybe Bruce would start eyeing the windows again if Harry didn’t distract him, he thought, and his mind started churning with the possibilities of what could be happening to them.

“Maybe I’m a secret government weapon,” Harry said. 

“Maybe you’re a conspiracy theorist,” Bruce said without hesitation. 

Harry blinked at him. “What?” 

A great sigh forced its way from Bruce’s chest. 

“Have you seriously already forgotten?” he asked. “Your first thought about how this—” here he gestured expansively around the room and at the two of them, as if what he really wanted to say was ‘this giant clusterfuck’ but wouldn’t let himself swear even in a highly swearable situation. “—came to be was…  _ aliens. _ ” He ground out the last word, as if it caused him physical pain to consider it. 

Harry paused, considering this. “Maybe being a government experiment is why I believe in aliens,” he suggested. He breathed in sharply and reached over, grabbed for Bruce as inspiration struck him. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, I’ve got it.” 

Bruce looked nothing more than like a man about to go to his death, which Harry did not think was very supportive of him. Weren’t partners supposed to believe in each other and support each other? He looked at the other man’s weary, serious face. 

“You should smile more,” Harry blurted out. “I bet it would de-age you by like, ten years.” 

The weary look deepened. “But then,” Bruce said. “How will people know how difficult my life is?”

It took Harry a second to realise what he had said, and then he gasped in delight. “Babe, you made a joke! You joke!” he enthused. “I’m so happy.” 

Bruce sighed. It was comfortingly familiar. “Harry,” he said slowly. “You were going to say something.” 

Harry kindly ignored the silence in the room at the end of the sentence that was clearly meant to be filled with a nice adverb like ‘brilliant’ or ‘dazzling’ and not something like ‘silly’ or ‘banal.’ Banal seemed like a very Bruce word. 

“I’ve had an epiphany,” he said. “I think I know our dramatic background.” 

“We don’t have a dramatic background,” Bruce said, only to be hushed by Harry, who placed a finger on his lips. Bruce stared at the offending appendage, faintly baffled. 

“Alright,” started Harry. “Here it is. I’m a government secret. You’re an assassin—okay, ex-assassin, don’t look at me like that,” he amended. “They send me out on jobs, which is why I have a gun and a magical girl transformation. You are also out on… jobs. Seriously, stop looking at me like that. We met at work,” he continued, ignoring Bruce’s scoff. “Which, I might add, is perfectly normal.” 

Here he fixed Bruce with his own look. See, the look said. We can be normal. We are two normal people doing normal things. 

“So. Maybe you were getting too close to the truth about the government secret thing,” he continued. “So they were going to kill us.” At this point he was speaking at a break-neck pace, the better to get out all of his theory before Bruce could break his own neck. “So we ran away to be together!” 

It was perfect. It was fantastic. It was  _ romantic _ . 

“Ridiculous,” said Bruce. “You’re a conspiracy theorist.” 

Harry sighed. Love was so difficult sometimes.

“Look,” he said. “Right now our options are either that we’re here to do a murder, or we’re here to avoid doing a murder. Which door would you rather take?” 

For a long moment, Bruce didn’t say anything, but then he sighed. “I really don’t want to have to kill anyone,” he said. 

Harry grinned. “Don’t worry,” he said, feeling the bruises developing on his torso from where Bruce had thrown him. “I don’t think you’re going to have to kill anyone.” 

With a huff, Bruce turned away, and they moved away from each other, resuming the little detective work they could do with no memories or people willing to fill them in on the decades they were missing and their histories as a possible assassin (ex-assassin, Harry mentally corrected himself, because Bruce would be able to tell if he made even a mental slip regarding his status as a killer) and a shady government project, and their fight to be together against the odds. 

Harry’s heart twisted at the possibility. Surely Harry with his memories in one piece would be just as enthralled by all the heartbreaking potential of it as he was without the knowledge. 

“I might have found something,” Bruce said from behind him, and Harry dropped the couch cushion he was peering under. 

“Tell,” he demanded, from his place on the floor. It was a good place. He could see so many things he wouldn’t have seen otherwise, like the weird carvings along the sides of the coffee table. Plus, rich person carpets were very comfortable. 

He didn’t think he wanted to get up, but when he twisted in place to look up at Bruce and heard the cracks of several joints in his leg protesting the move, he mournfully realised that the plushness of expensive carpeting could not save a boy from age and weird experiments. Sighing with regret, he pushed himself up onto the couch, and his back thanked him for solid support. 

“Damn this mortal body,” he muttered to himself before turning to face Bruce, who had, unfortunately for both of them, been watching this show. 

“I have photographs,” he said, holding up his wallet in explanation.

Bruce’s wallet was, unsurprisingly, plain black leather but plain black in the way that a thousand dollar perfectly tailored suit is just another suit. It was like everything he seemed to own: absurdly expensive and weirdly understated. Assassins, Harry reasoned to himself, must be well paid. Not that Bruce, repentant as he was, was an assassin anymore. But even ex-assassins still had old payslips. Or whatever it was that assassins used. Maybe invoices. 

There were several photographs tucked away in it—boys and girls of varying ages, several of them bearing a striking resemblance to Bruce with their dark hair and blue eyes. One boy had apparently been caught mid-sneer, and it was as if someone had lifted the expression right off Bruce’s normally stoic face. 

“Holy shit,” Harry breathed. “We’re parents.” 

#

In the end, it was Bruce who suggested that it was time they left the hotel and face the big scary world. Well, he didn’t phrase it like that. What he said was more along the lines of “If we don’t get some fresh air soon I might lose what is left of my mind and throw you through the window.” 

Well. What he actually said was “Get your bag and let’s go,” with a look so serious that Harry didn’t make any of the dozen jokes that he wanted to. 

The world (the hotel, that was) outside their room was as quiet as it has seemed within those walls. The floor was still covered in thick immaculate carpet, and Harry was certain that this was itself unusual. 

Bruce didn’t seem bothered by any of it, and just walked calmly down the hall, black case in hand. Maybe that was how he looked when he was on his way to—work. Harry kicked himself for the thought. 

The image of those photos flashed into his mind as he watched Bruce attempt not to stalk down halls as if his favourite prey was at the other end of the hunt. Trying to reconcile who they were,  _ how _ they were, with even the concept of ‘family’ was—disconcerting. 

At reception, Harry people-watched as Bruce smiled (he could smile! And look normal doing it!) and said that no, there were no problems, everything was wonderful, thank you, and the receptionist watched him calmly, but—as if something were a little off. Were they regulars here? Was Bruce? 

The possibility that they could be regulars somewhere, whether it was a coffee shop, a restaurant, a hotel—somewhere where they could be known by people outside this secret of theirs hadn’t occurred to him, but he would bet that that was the sort of thing he might skip over and that Bruce picked up on for him, paranoid as he was. 

The other people at the hotel were more along Bruce’s type than his own—people who looked like they were important and who walked and talked like they knew it. He was avidly watching and simultaneously trying not to watch a man argue on his phone with what sounded like a dozen people at once when he was pulled from out of his head by the return of a non-smiling Bruce. 

This was the normal man who Harry had spent the day getting to know, not the man who apparently would stand around and talk to a hotel worker about—what had it been, how hard it was for them to find a  _ good  _ cup of black coffee these days? 

_ What a pretentious ass _ , he thought fondly, as he let himself be guided out of the safety of the building and into the great unknown. 

#

He didn’t recognise the city but that didn’t say much, really. Skyscrapers and busy sidewalks could have been any of hundreds of places. A couple of people turned to watch them as they made their way, following the flow of the city, and he took note of the way dozens of people seemed to deliberately not turn to look at them—the way they sneaked glances out of the corner of their eyes, the quick turn of their heads, they way they seemed to take in their presence and then consciously pushed it to one side. 

It was, in a word, freaky. 

“Hey,” he said, leaning toward Bruce and keeping his voice low. “Don’t look, but I think we might be famous or something.” 

Bruce slanted a glance at him. “The looks?” 

Of course he’d noticed. The man seemed to be almost omniscient, always aware, always watching. It was the sort of thing that seemed like it would get really irritating really quickly. 

“Maybe we’re actors,” Harry whispered. 

Bruce curled a heavy hand over his shoulder and guided him down an alley. 

“Is this the part where you kill me?” Harry joked. “Because I didn’t really mean it about the actors thing, and really, I thought we had something  _ special _ .” 

In what was looking increasingly like a default setting, Bruce ignored him.

“We’re being followed,” he said through a mouth that barely moved.

Harry went cold. “How long?” he asked quietly, not dropping the smile. 

“Since we left the hotel.” 

Harry faked a low laugh and leaned in closer. Slightly louder, he said, “You don’t need to drag me down filthy alleys to get me alone.” 

Bruce’s hand slid from his shoulder down to his waist, and he held him close for a minute, before letting him move away. “Instincts,” he said, a thread of irritation stealing into his voice. “I don’t—” 

His jaw clenched and Harry felt a surge of sympathy. Bruce Wayne and Harry Jordan, whoever they were, must have led interesting lives—they were a mess of instincts and habits they didn’t understand or remember developing. Harry considered the ring in his pocket, a heavy weight for something so small and light. 

“It’s okay,” he said, bumping Bruce’s elbow. “I get you.” 

Bruce’s face didn’t change much but there was something in the black abyss of Harry’s memories that told him that that specific quick as a flash quirk of his face, a twitch at best, was his gratitude. 

Which was dumb. Harry hadn’t done anything to be grateful for. 

They took a sudden turn to the left, and started on a truly bizarre route that Harry would never have been able to recall. 

“We’ve been down this road,” Harry said, as they doubled back. 

Bruce didn’t look at him. “We haven’t.” 

Harry was very certain he recognised the graffiti on the wall, but Bruce seemed so certain of himself that he doubted his recollection, and shrugged and let the man continue to guide him. The question of if they had or hadn’t been down the route before ceased to matter as they crossed roads only to cross again after a few minutes. They moved between cars and went through one entrance of a large store only to work through to the other side, and take to narrow streets again. 

“Whoever it was,” Harry said as they turned down another backstreet. “They weren’t very persistent.” 

“Hm,” said Bruce. It was a contemplative Hm which—like most things, really—was new, so Harry carefully filed it away in his ever-growing Bruce to English mental dictionary. He had the feeling that the dictionary was going to grow quite a bit. 

Bruce searched one way; Harry turned in the other direction, casting around for any hint of suspicious or familiar people. 

“Nada,” Harry said, facing Bruce again. “You?”

“Clear as far as I can see,” he confirmed. 

Harry relaxed slightly at that. Bruce did not. 

“It would be best if we left the area,” Bruce said, and Harry nodded. 

“Yeah, of course,” he agreed. “And, uh. How exactly are we going to do that?” 

Bruce turned his eyes in the direction of a run-down looking car, abandoned on the street. It didn’t exactly look like the best area, with boarded up storefronts, some of which were half broken down, and people wandering around who made Harry glad that he wasn’t walking around by himself.

“A car,” said Bruce, and he made to walk in the direction of the car. Someone else’s car. 

“Um. What,” said Harry. “What exactly are we doing now?” 

Bruce rolled his shoulders slightly. “That feeling you’ve mentioned before,” he said. “About something feeling familiar.” 

Oh no. Oh no. Harry did not like this, not at all. 

“This feels familiar,” Bruce finished. 

Harry really, really did not like this. 

“Stealing cars feels familiar to you,” he said, disbelieving. “You killed people and stole cars.” 

Never mind the aliens thing. Maybe Bruce really was part of the mob. What was he going to pull out from behind that polished posh exterior next—drugs? He didn’t look like someone who would deal in drugs, but then again, that was a common problem they had. Harry didn’t exactly know what a mob drug dealing, car stealing, hitman would look like. 

“This shocks you?” Bruce asked. “This?”

“We’ll find somewhere else,” Harry said, steering him away from temptation. “Maybe there’s somewhere we can rent a car, I don’t know.” 

Bruce looked over at him. It was definitely a Look, and was filed away. “I don’t think we’ll find a car to rent in the nearest 7/11,” he said. 

Harry rolled his eyes. “For someone so smart, you can be really dumb,” he said. “Give me your phone.” 

Bruce handed it over without complaint. 

“Oh, wait,” he said, as he put it into Harry’s hand. He took it back and quickly unlocked it, grimacing at a stream of notifications—missed calls and unread messages from the mysterious Dick. He dismissed them, and handed it back. 

“What are you doing?” Bruce asked, after handing away his possessions without blinking. 

“Googling,” Harry said, pulling up the browser. He blinked. “Oh. Huh,” he said, turning the screen to Bruce. 

“I think you may be a man of many talents,” he said as Bruce looked at the WayneSearch page. Bruce raised an interested eyebrow. 

“Likely not an actor, then,” he said. 

“Ha ha,” Harry rolled his eyes, typing. “You’re so funny.” 

After a moment he looked up, pleased. 

“There’s a place not too far,” he said, handing the phone back. It was open on a map which Bruce, without a word of acknowledgment, promptly began to follow. 

“Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome,” Harry muttered, but he still followed. 

They walked mostly in silence until, closer to their destination, Harry had a terrible realisation. 

“Hang on,” he said, grabbing Bruce’s elbow and dragging him to a corner. “How exactly are we paying for this? And uh. Is this the sort of thing you can just… walk into?” 

Bruce held up the phone. “According to this,” he said, waving it a little, “I am a famous, somewhat eccentric, billionaire.” He gave Harry a very flat look. “How many people say no to money?”

“So we’re certain you’re really Bruce Wayne?” Harry blurted out. “We’re sure that’s your money?” 

Bruce stared at him. “Should we not be?” 

“I just don’t know,” Harry said. He wasn’t fretting. “I don’t know if we should use it.”

It felt weird, being the responsible one. The one asking questions. Taking precautions. 

“It is a card in my wallet,” Bruce said slowly. “In my name. It is safe to assume it is mine.”

“But are we sure that it’s your name?” Harry sad, beginning to fret. He could admit that to himself. “What if this is part of your—thing,” he finished, awkwardly. He hated even alluding to it, for the look that it cast over Bruce’s face.

Something in his face died a little. “Part of the assassin thing,” he said. “You think that part of my having killed people may have involved… stealing their identities?”

It sounded bad when Bruce said it back to him, but Bruce repeating back most of Harry’s ideas made them sound bad, even if they were great. Like this.

“It’s a valid concern,” said Harry.

“I killed people,” Bruce said with what would be admirable emotionlessness coming from anyone else, about literally any other topic. “I killed people and you are more concerned about identity theft.”

“Identity theft is a serious crime,” Harry said. “Maybe we should avoid doing crime.” Or avoid doing further crime.

“Are you certain about your alien theory?” Bruce asked out of the blue. He was good at changing subjects but Harry had noticed that there normally tended to be at least the pretence of politeness in it.

He sighed. “As certain as I am of anything,” he said. “Up to and including my name. Why do you ask?”

A curiously innocent expression crossed Bruce’s face. Harry didn’t trust it in the slightest.

“Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking what an excellent cop you would be, with your strong feelings regarding the law.”

Harry gasped. “Take that back,” he urged, grasping Bruce’s arm. “I can’t be responsible. It feels bad.”

“No,” Bruce said mercilessly. “That’s the milkshake and cookies you had for breakfast.” He tried to shake Harry off, totally uncaring of the crisis he had just thrown his partner into, and redirecting his annoyance back toward the milkshake which they had been having an ongoing silent argument about since the morning. “Perhaps try something with less sugar in it. Like actual food.”

Harry dropped his arm in disgust. “Ugh,” he said. “Maybe you really are Bruce Wayne—you’re certainly snobby enough to be rich like that.”

“Healthy,” he said primly, “is not snobby.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He didn’t think there was anybody in the world with the energy to change Bruce’s mind when he had decided on something. Bruce stepped away before Harry could push him.

“If you will excuse me,” he said. “I have to go rent a car with my serial killer money, so I don’t offend your delicate police sensibilities with other options.”

_ Police sensibilities.  _ Hal nearly retched. He could hijack a car if he wanted to. Maybe he just didn’t like the car. People could have their interests, Bruce. He was still spluttering over the horror show that was the idea of him trying to enforce law and order when Bruce turned and walked away from him.

He loitered on the street corner in protest, but from the way people’s eyes slid over him he didn’t think they understood the purpose of his slouch so he meandered away and leaned against the wall instead, one foot pulled up against the brick. It definitely made him look not cop-like.

Harry scowled at the ground. What did Bruce know, anyway? Nothing. Neither of them did.

Bruce’s return, later than expected, was heralded by the silent appearance of his well-polished shoes in Harry’s field of vision. He raised his head, taking in the glint of keys hanging off of Bruce’s fingers.

“We also need to go to a bank,” Bruce said. Harry raised an eyebrow.

“Broke already?” he asked.

Bruce scoffed lightly. “From the way they reacted to me? Not hardly. But it would be better if people—” he raised his eyebrows minutely “—were not able to track, say, card transactions.”

Duh. Harry mentally gave himself a kick for not thinking of it, but consoled himself with the knowledge that he was not as inherently paranoid as Bruce. It seemed like a good thing. He tilted his head in the direction of an ATM he had spotted during his brief time spent as a slightly too old teenage delinquent loitering insolently on street corners.

“No need for a bank just yet,” he said. “Problem solved.”

“For now,” said Bruce. Hal appreciated his dedication to the role of Serious Grouch. Surely every runaway team hellbent on personal justice and on opposing The Man (Whoever That Was) needed one. Bruce and his ever-present slight frown were perfect.

Harry didn’t realise cash existed in the quantities that existed in Bruce’s world, but he took a moment to be grateful for apparent billionaires with questionable pasts who were on his side, and tried not to look as poor as he felt as Bruce stuffed the money into his wallet.

“Should do us for a while,” he muttered as they made their way to the new car.

He didn’t, as it turned out, remember anything about cars, or maybe it was that he didn’t know anything about them in the first place. Either way, the car Bruce had rented was gorgeous—sleek and black and very, very noticeable.

Harry stared at it.

“They just… let you have this?” he asked.

“That is how it works,” Bruce said.

“Whatever happened to ‘below the radar’?” he asked. He liked the car. He did. He wanted to keep it. But it very much said that someone had capital-M Money and wanted attention. Bruce grimaced.

“I am apparently well known,” he said. Hal nodded: they had worked that out very quickly. “I thought it best to at least temporarily lean into the—rich person look.”

For once he looked obviously uncomfortable in public.

“Aw,” Harry said, taking pity on him. “That’s okay. I’ll enjoy spending your money, then.”

A mild glare.

“I will ask permission before enjoying spending your money,” he amended.

“Slightly better,” Bruce sighed. “Not get in the car and stop complaining.”

Harry obeyed. 

#

The first place they stopped at, at Harry’s direction, Bruce took one look at and said, “No.” 

Harry scoffed. “Yeah,” he said. “Because we can be choosy. Oh, I know! Let’s go to the Ritz instead.” He looked at Bruce, and sighed. “I’m not a fan either, but you really look like you should not be driving and, let’s be honest. There’s no way you’re letting me behind the wheel of this thing.” 

It wasn’t a lie. Maybe Bruce was the one who should have taken the extra long nap in the hotel, because in Harry’s expert opinion he looked like garbage. He told him so. 

“Thank you for your honesty,” Bruce said. “It is much appreciated.” 

Harry had the feeling that it wasn’t appreciated in the slightest, but he didn’t want their first fight to be about if lying was bad.

“You are very welcome,” he said magnanimously. “Now, let’s go.” 

“No,” Bruce said again, as he reversed away from the—alright, away from the more than slightly seedy looking motel. 

“What the—what are you doing?” Harry demanded. 

Bruce didn’t look at him. “Do you want to keep your kidneys,” he said. He very definitely did not ask it. 

Harry hadn’t thought that the possession of his kidneys and the placement of them had been in doubt. “Yes?”

“Then we stay somewhere else.” 

Harry stared at the side of his face. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said, beginning to doubt. 

No, he told himself. Doubt isn’t permitted. If you begin to doubt, then Bruce will begin to win and he will not want to stop winning. 

Bruce still didn’t look at him, but in a decidedly deliberate way and not in a ‘I am watching the road’ way. This was much more ‘I am watching the road mostly so I don’t have to watch you say dumb things.’ Harry didn’t like this not-looking. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” he insisted. Still, the silence.

Harry slumped in his seat. “Spoiled rich people,” he muttered. Probably expecting luxuries like doors and windows that lock.

Bruce reached over awkwardly and patted Harry’s knee. “Trust me,” he said, withdrawing his hand. “I’ll find somewhere.” 

The ‘somewhere’ Bruce found them was a stretch of road that seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be abandoned. 

“I have walked into a horror movie,” Harry said flatly. “I am in a horror movie and this is where I die horribly after foolishly trusting someone who the audience instantly didn’t.” 

Bruce ignored him.

“We should sleep in shifts,” he was saying. 

Internally, Harry screamed. 

Out loud, he said, very calmly, “I disagree.” 

It was very mature of him, he thought. What he wanted to do was tell Bruce he was an idiot, but that wasn’t really true. And a part of him—an unfortunately large part—could see where he was coming from.

Instead of getting angry, or depriving himself of more sleep, he continued: “Neither of us is doing well. We need more sleep. I am very sure we’re both people who will wake if the clouds move too quickly, let alone anything else happening.” Very deliberately, and still maddeningly calmly, he said, “Nobody is going to sneak up on us.” 

And that was that.

They had spent the first night after the hotel in the car and, after taking a good look at the seats and seeing a future of neck and back pain, Harry had spent the night on the backseat, regretting things like ‘height’ and ‘knees’ and ‘backs.’ Bruce apparently fell asleep sitting upright at the wheel, ready to take off if the wrong bird landed on the roof of the car. 

After another night of listening to gentle snores (which he marvelled at because, snores! Human functions! He wondered if he could ever stop being amazed by Bruce’s vulnerable humanity, and decided that life was much improved when his conception of his partner was as a highly advanced robot who had learned to mimic human life) while he lay silent and still, in the cramped space, familiar in a way that he wasn’t sure he liked at all. 

“I think we need to find beds again,” he said to the window when dawn had finally broken and Bruce’s internal alarm had gone off with a vengeance. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window, letting the rattle of it lull him into wakeful human-ness. Movement was good. 

Bruce said nothing for so long that Hal almost thought he would have to repeat himself but he couldn’t find the energy within himself after his long night watch, and he had just about resigned himself to an evening quarrel when Bruce said, “We can find somewhere tonight.” 

He didn’t ask questions. There wasn’t judgement in his voice. It was a basic request and simple decency, but Harry closed his eyes and leaned back against the window, swallowing against the hard lump in his throat. Ridiculous. He’d almost definitely slept in worse places. A couple of nights in a small space shouldn’t be this big of a deal. 

But he didn’t take it back, and they didn’t talk about it again, and after that first terrible night, even the worst room was a blessing. 

The place they stopped at didn’t really have working lights in the room, and there was a weird smell coming from the vent, but there was a bed with covers and hard flat pillows, and it was almost as good as that hotel they had woken up in. 

Harry slept soundly, and when Bruce’s cold toes brushed against him in the morning under the flickering lights, he didn’t complain. And the next night, when they drove and drove and eventually found somewhere, Bruce didn’t turn them around again. 

#  


As he stamped down hard on a spider, Harry considered the alternate realm in which motels seemed to exist, and the different levels of what were ‘acceptable standards’—none of which seemed to conform to any basic standard he could think of. It was a realm in which you never really knew what you were going to get. Was this a liminal space? Is that what that meant? A space not meant for humans for long?

Idly he daydreamed of the room they had stayed in last night, where everything was lovely and clean and there weren’t spiders slipping up out of drains or from underneath beds. 

“Nobody’s going to sneak up on us,” Bruce said in an odd tone as there came a knock at the door. 

Harry tilted his head quizzically, before the phrase resonated with him. He groaned. 

“Are you serious?” he asked. “This is a totally different thing.” 

Again, a knock. More insistent, and in a peculiar pattern, like—like a code, he realised. Like someone had set up a code. His shoulders slumped. Maybe it wasn’t a totally different thing, then. 

Bruce gave him a hard look, then moved to gather his belongings, which left Harry and the mystery on the other side of the door. 

A part of him felt that he should be relieved that Bruce wasn’t hovering over his shoulder for this, ready to take over. And sure, the trust was appreciated, but still: the  _ abandonment. _

A third knock. Well. It was more of a banging, but the sentiment was there. 

Harry plastered a polite smile on his face and opened the door. 

The guy at the door didn’t look very impressive. He looked—frazzled, like he didn’t know why he was standing there, which made two of them. Probably it was three, but he was respecting Bruce’s decision to pretend that he always knew everything, because he was considerate like that.

“Can I… help you?” Harry asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Bruce quickly and efficiently pack away everything they had brought with them. There wasn’t a lot, and it wasn’t as if they had been starting a new life in the room or anything, but still it was impressive how quickly Bruce was ready to pack and run. Obviously, Harry reminded himself, it wasn’t for a very impressive  _ reason _ . But at least they could do it. 

The man looked at him as if he had just announced that he was the new ruler of the moon and all would be welcome in his new cheese palace. That is to say, he looked at Harry as if he were nuts. 

“Come on, Hal,” he said, vaguely irritated. “It’s me, you don’t need to look so worried.” 

‘Me’ didn’t elaborate on his mysterious identity, instead continuing with, “Look, we don’t get why you and bats cut and run, but it’s fine, you’re going to be okay.” 

Harry stared at him. He was fairly certain he didn’t have any bats. They seemed like the sort of thing you would notice, amnesia or not. 

“Sorry,” he said, closing the door. “I think you have the wrong person.” 

The man groaned as he stuck his foot out to catch the door, arm leaning heavily against it. He leaned forward, peering into the room. 

“There he is,” he said lowly, catching sight of Bruce coming in from what Harry thought might be the bathroom. He glanced back at Harry. “I know he can get really into his disguises,” he said. “But this is kind of ridiculous and I have no clue how he got you to go this far for it.” 

Harry blinked. Disguises? Their disguises? Maybe this man did know him. And Hal did sound like it could be him. Maybe. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to get used to another new name—remembering to answer to Harry was hard enough. 

“Hal,” the man continued. “Seriously, what are you  _ doing _ . It’s me, Ollie.” 

“Uh,” he started, pushing harder against the door. But before he could finish, Bruce was there, edging between him and ‘Ollie’. 

“You’ll have to excuse my friend,” he said, far more friendly than he’d been toward Harry (Hal?) half an hour ago. “I’m afraid my friend took a knock on the head earlier. He’ll be fine, he’s just a bit confused.” 

He smiled at Ollie, who just looked more and more as if a dog had just stood up on its hind legs and introduced itself to him in perfect English. Harry had a sinking feeling that had gone past floating gently downward and had skipped straight for hurtling leagues beneath the sea at a rapid pace. 

“Bruce,” Ollie said, confirming Harry’s bad feeling. “Are you feeling alright?” 

Bruce didn’t blink. “Fine,” he lied. “Why do you ask?”

He hadn’t dropped his small friendly smile. It was starting to weird Harry out a little. 

“Well,” Ollie drawled, eyebrows crawling up his forehead. “You just called Hal your friend, for one. And you’re clearly in a very good mood.” 

Bruce smiling was as weird as Harry thought. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. 

As Ollie spoke, his faintly incredulous look slowly gave way to a disbelieving one. 

“Oh, no,” he said, pressing a hand to his face. “I thought she was exaggerating. Why did I think she was exaggerating.” 

Bruce took a step back, pushing Hal further into the room. Hal-who-was-Harry pushed back discreetly. 

“You’ll have to excuse us,” he said politely as Harry pushed into him. “I’m afraid we’re very busy.” 

“Yeah,” Ollie snapped, along with his patience. “Busy giving everyone else a headache.” 

“I don’t know who you think I am,” Bruce said firmly, “but you have the wrong people.” 

“Who’s everyone else?” Harry broke in. They both turned to him, irritated: Bruce that he would keep this conversation going, Ollie for—well, apparently for having to ask. 

“The league,” he said in the same tone you would use to tell someone the sky is blue. Harry bristled at it. 

But there was something about the name. 

“Are you with the government?” he asked. Bruce’s eyes cut to him sharply. 

“No,” Ollie said. “Well, not really. Sort of, maybe.” 

Ice slid down Hal’s spine at the hedging. Bruce leaned heavily against his side, uncaring of the man’s disbelieving stare. 

“Like I said,” Bruce said, still polite but with a far more serious undertone. “We’re busy, and you’ll have to excuse us.” 

With that he slammed the door, breaking Harry’s hold on his arm, and Ollie jumped back before he lost a finger or two to the slam. 

“Fuck,” they heard him bite out. “ _ Fuck _ .”

He tried to open the door, but it had locked automatically, so instead he knocked, hard. “Guys, seriously,” he said loudly. “You’re confused, I get it. It’ll be okay. I’ll bring you back to the league and we’ll get this sorted.” 

Bruce pushed heavily against the door, not trusting the lock. Harry slid away to shuffle the chest of drawers against the corner until it was flush against the door. 

“So,” he muttered to Bruce. “Agreed we’re not going?” 

Bruce’s icy stare didn’t just speak volumes. It wrote encyclopedias and sang epics. 

“Bags by the bed,” he said. “Windows look good.” 

Harry wished they had the sort of life where Bruce could randomly tell him about nice architecture and construction or interior decor, but he unfortunately took the meaning of the statement.

He sighed. “Babe,” he said, just to make sure. “Are we climbing out the window to avoid weird government people?” 

“The vents are too small,” said Bruce, like these were regular decisions regular people made. 

But then, memory loss. For all he knew, there were many people who spent their lives climbing out of windows and hunting out decent crawlspaces. 

“Alright,” he said. “I guess we’re doing this.” 

#

“So my driver’s license is from California,” Harry said later as they drove away. (Or should it be Hal? It was hard enough adjusting to  _ Harry  _ and remembering that it was him, let alone changing his name  _ again _ .)

Bruce’s answering grunt said very clearly, “Of course you are, good for you, what does this have to do with me” and Harry mentally tacked on the “I am very tired, please excuse my abruptness” that he had been adding to Bruce’s personal vocabulary, which made it much more acceptable to him. 

“Well,” he said. “I don’t think either of us wants to drive to California?” 

The point of this line of thought finally penetrated the fog of paranoia around Bruce. His eyes flickered as he recalled his own license and passport. It was odd, like seeing something intensely private. Hal almost felt like he should avert his eyes and give Bruce’s exhausted brain privacy in its time of need, but the novelty of seeing him not be five steps ahead was too much for him to pass up and so he watched avidly as it played out in the fine lines of Bruce’s face. 

“Gotham,” he said. There was no trace of anything other than steely determination in his voice, and Harry-who-was-Hal briefly found himself wishing not for the first time that Bruce would allow himself to relax. But the man stood like he was made of stone with a steel frame and couldn’t be shaken. Not even by weirdo alien experiments, or vague government agents. 

“Gotham?” Hal repeated.

Bruce nodded. “We need to go to Gotham.” 

Good. Excellent. Fantastic. They finally had a realistic, achievable goal. Get to Gotham, find the family, figure out who they were, and definitely do not traumatise any children by revealing anyone’s sordid history of paid violence. They could do this. 

Hal blinked. “So do you remember how to get to Gotham?” he asked. “Because I have to admit, it doesn’t look like our good old friend Amnesia is going to give me a break on this one.” 

Bruce grimaced. Well. On anyone else’s face it wouldn’t have been anything other than a twitch, a slight muscle spasm, but for him it was very nearly demonstrative. Harry was almost giddy with having seen it—a smile, a display of human weakness, and now this? It was nearing being scandalously open considering how much time together had been spent with Bruce practicing his rock impersonation. 

“It would be best not to rely on muscle memory for this,” he said, meaning that he didn’t have a clue but would probably rather chew his hand off than actually say those words out loud where another person could hear them. “We can pick up a map—”

A  _ map _ . Okay. 

“Or,” Hal said. “And I’m just spitballing here. Or we could just use this handy little thing called the phone.” 

Bruce stared at him, then blinked slowly.

Hal stared back. 

“You forgot about what we just did, didn’t you?” he asked, eventually. 

Bruce said nothing. 

“Okay,” Hal said. “Okay. We can put this down to tired amnesia brain. It doesn’t have to be a thing. Anyway. The phone has internet, and the internet has maps. We’re going to be fine.” 

He tried very hard not to feel like he should not have said that.

#

Hal frowned. “Should I recognise this place?” he asked. It was very familiar, like he had seen it not just before but very recently. He blinked, as he realised. 

“No,” he said. “Bruce, no. Tell me I’m wrong.” 

“You’re wrong,” Bruce said obligingly. “But no, you’re not wrong about this.” 

Hal considered throwing himself out of the car and rolling away to freedom—sweet, sweet freedom, away from people who would deliberately drive in circles. 

“Your memory must be worse than I thought,” Hal said, faintly horrified. “Just as a recap, the plan involved moving away. As in, away from here.” 

Bruce turned left. Someone leaned on their horn for a very long time. “I am following the plan,” Bruce said. “It was, after all, mainly my plan.” 

First of all, rude. Hal definitely contributed to the plan. Second of all: “ _ How _ is driving  _ in circles _ getting us closer to Gotham?” Hal demanded. 

Bruce took another left. “Because,” he said. “They will expect people to move in a straight—or mostly straight—line. Doubling back adds time, but they’re not going to be stalking street corners we passed two days ago. They’ll have moved on.” 

Oh. Of course. It was pretty obvious after it had been pointed out to him, and he grimaced at the fact that it had to be pointed out. 

Bruce’s gaze slid over to him. “You should get more sleep,” he said. “You think clearer when you’re not exhausted.” 

Which, yes, of course you do. But Hal wasn’t—he wasn’t  _ exhausted _ . Maybe he could do with a nap or a snooze. But it didn’t mean anything and Bruce didn’t need to keep bringing it up at every stoplight in that awful “Should I be worried” tone. 

The car swerved slightly and briefly Hal was cured of any sort of tiredness. 

“You alright?” he asked. Not a day could go by without there being some kind of ordeal for one or both of them. Maybe Bruce had seen an advert for another circus. Maybe he saw—

“I’m fine,” Bruce said, outrageously flat even for him.

Or maybe he didn’t see anything. 

“Black cat crossed our path?” Hal offered. 

Sometimes Bruce would take some cash and go to a random little coffee shop on a random street and bring back two cups of coffee. 

“We both need to be alert,” he would say, as if he was the one who couldn’t keep his eyes open for more than ninety minutes. “We don’t need me falling asleep at the wheel.” 

Hal wanted to do that for him. They had enough going on. 

Bruce didn’t look at him. “A tabby,” he said.

“Adorable,” Hal nodded. 

Neither of them pointed out that there were no cats in the area. They settled back into silence, Bruce’s momentary lapse a heavy weight in the air between them, and Hal tried desperately to shift it. Inspiration struck. 

“Maybe we should have disguises,” Hal said, already preparing himself to be shot down, his hopes and dreams dashed upon the hard rocks of Bruce’s ruthless and unfortunately unerring ability to suck the fun out of his life. 

But Bruce raised an eyebrow at him approvingly, or as approving as granite gets, and said, “A good idea.” 

And Hal’s dreams turned into birds that flew high into the sky of his imagination, or maybe it was that Bruce’s rocks turned into bouncy castles. He liked the idea of bouncy castles. It was also possible that the sky of imagination had gone too high for him and that he had lost himself in metaphor. Or that he needed sleep. 

“Of course it was a great idea,” he said. “It was my idea. I am full of great ideas, I will have you know.” 

Bruce lost the approving look. “Your food choices are not great ideas and we are not doing this again.” 

‘This’ was the argument, if it could be called that, that had been picked up repeatedly over the last few days, coinciding with whenever they ate or debated where or what to eat. 

“I accept your concession in this matter graciously,” Hal said smugly. 

“I concede nothing,” Bruce said. “You’ve clearly never eaten good food in your life, but we don’t have the time for me to dissect your food crimes at length.” 

Hal, taking pity on Bruce’s poor eyebrows which were struggling to find a new minutely different way to frown to express Food Displeasure, let the matter drop. 

“Alright,” he said. “So, about these disguises.” 

“We’re going to need moustaches,” Bruce said. “And maybe beards.” 

Hal gazed at him. At times it was as though they lived on entirely different planets. As though they could be from different species. And then the man had to go and see right into his soul. 

“Fake glasses,” said Hal, eyes fixed to the side of Bruce’s face. “Sideburns.” 

Bruce nodded. Hal’s heart nearly exploded with delight. 

This must have been how it started for them the first time. 

After the whole guns and paid murder thing, that is. 

He leaned back, eyes on the long road ahead of them. Something about the whole…  _ everything _ … of their situation niggled at something in his mind. 

“You know,” he said slowly. “This reminds me of a movie I think I saw once.” 

“Hm,” said Bruce. It was his interested ‘hm’ rather than any of the less happy ‘hm’s. So far the dismissive ‘hm’ was Hal’s least favourite, but he would bet that Bruce had a few others still tucked away. “You know,” he said, mimicking Hal’s tone. “It reminds me of something, too.” 

“Yes!” Hal grinned. “It’s just like—”

“ _ Spy Kids _ ,” said Bruce with finality. “It’s just like  _ Spy Kids _ .” 

Hal, who had in fact been about to say  _ Mr and Mrs Smith _ , stared at him. He remembered  _ Spy Kids _ . How could he have forgotten it?

“You,” he said to his partner. “You are perfect.”

The corner of Bruce’s mouth quirked up, but he said nothing. 

The disguises they got weren’t anything to write home about, really. A couple of old suits and glasses from a Goodwill they stopped at at random, where Hal found some of the ugliest shirts on earth and that, despite many sad looks in Bruce’s direction and the (in his opinion, very solid) argument of “they’re so eye-searingly bad that nobody will want to look at us, come on, it’s perfect,” he was not allowed to buy.

“The point of a disguise is to look boring,” Bruce said eventually, exasperated and looking right at Hal’s face and not at the hideous patterns that Hal was helpfully holding up for his vicious judgement. “To be forgettable.” 

The shirts sagged in sadness. 

“Yeah,” Hal said, gazing at them. “These are pretty memorable.” 

“People will notice if we look like we just stepped out of the seventies,” Bruce said. 

As he said goodbye to his true loves and placed the shirts back on the rack, the idea for revenge rose up in his mind. He suppressed a smile. 

“It’s too bad,” he said with a sigh. “They’re so— _ cokemilk _ .” 

Bruce’s immediate disgust couldn’t be hidden and Hal left the store with a bag of barely moth eaten clothes, a spring in his step, and a new weapon.

“This is not going to be a… thing,” Bruce said directly into his ear on the way back to the car. “Hal. You have more dignity than that.” 

Hal wasn’t sure he did. “Don’t know what you mean, babe,” he said, cheerfully swinging the bag. “I’m just out and about and having a perfectly cokemilk day. Aren’t you?” 

“I have never regretted anything more than I regret you,” Bruce’s eyebrows said. They were exceedingly eloquent eyebrows. 

“We have a long drive ahead of us,” Bruce’s mouth said. 

Hal smiled at him, beatific. Bruce glowered politely. “That’s fine by me,” he said. “We can play I Spy.”

#

Life continued as a series of motels, in various states of disrepair. The car they had claimed for their own wasn’t great for sleeping in but privately Hal had come to the realisation that maybe he had just been ruined for sleeping forever by the luxury of the first bed he ever remembered. Still, the memory of the first night was enough for him to bite back his complaints and to silence him when he felt the urge to take back his initial objections, and so: each night, a new place. 

It was during one of these nights when Hal, jerked awake by the sound of someone breathing near him, rolled over in bed to look at Bruce. 

They lay not only on opposite sides but so far apart on the bed that all touch was sure to be deliberate. 

“Weird question,” he whispered into the dark as his eyes adjusted to the light. 

Bruce’s eyes opened too easily for him to have been sleeping deeply. “Hm?” 

“Is this weird for you?” Hal asked. 

Bruce blinked slowly and Hal, out of nowhere, was reminded of a cat. The blink was a ghost of a movement in the dim light. “Is what weird?” 

“I am almost certain I don’t particularly want to kiss you,” Hal said. “You don’t want to kiss me, do you?” 

Bruce groaned slightly, then turned to look at the horrifyingly bright screen of his phone, which temporarily blinded them both. 

“You want to have this conversation at a quarter to three in the morning?” he asked. 

Well, it wasn’t as if Hal checked a clock every time he had a world-changing thought, but sure. 

“Is there a better time for it?” he asked. 

“During daylight,” said a voice that sounded like Bruce and came from Bruce’s side of the bed but which surely could not have been him, because it was a ridiculous thing for Bruce ‘The Original Night Owl’ Wayne to say, and was clearly just a desperate attempt to flee the real terror in their lives: serious conversations. 

“I don’t want to kiss you,” Hal repeated, “I feel like this is important. Not an emergency, but it’s still important.” He paused briefly, letting the statement have its weight, and then before Bruce could comment on the earth-shattering revelation, added: “Maybe it’s a halmergency.” 

“A—halmergency,” Bruce echoed, focusing on the least important part of that announcement. 

“Yes,” said Hal patiently. He couldn’t expect great logic from everyone at three in the morning. Not even Bruce. Not even at a quarter to three. “A halmergency. An emergency to me, Hal.” 

Bruce breathed out slowly. “It really is a wonder,” he said, “that I don’t want to kiss you, when you are so clearly the height of genius.” 

“You don’t want to kiss me either!” he said, ignoring the insult. Some people forgot their manners at three in the morning. “Is that weird? Is this weird?” 

He gestured at the space between them. 

“Not really,” Bruce said, eyes drifting shut. “We probably have head trauma. Or maybe we’re just not like that.” 

“Like that? Like dating?” It was one of the first things they had decided on, about their shared mystery. If they were wrong about that— 

“Physically affectionate,” said Bruce, far too coherent for someone who looked like they had already fallen asleep. 

As he said it, Hal relaxed. The world was still steady. He had gone on the run with Bruce without hesitation, had run from the unknown with the most steady presence anybody had ever known. 

Maybe it was the trauma. Maybe it was just the way they were. Maybe it was something else they hadn’t considered since he had insisted on having the talk at what was frankly ass o’clock in the morning. 

But Bruce had had the talk with him at ass o’clock in the morning because Hal had believed it was important, and he hadn’t kicked Hal for nudging him with ice-brick toes and in the morning they would have breakfast and Bruce would tell him that he was disgusting even as he bought Hal a milkshake before ten in the morning, without hesitation.

Hal nudged his freezing toes against Bruce’s ankles once more because he could, and then withdrew entirely to his side of the bed before a revenge strike could be launched, and fell asleep to the sound of someone breathing near him. 

He didn’t wake again until sunlight broke through the window at a far more reasonable hour. 

#

“What do you think I should do about the ring?” Hal asked in response to Bruce’s morning grunt. 

The man frowned at him. “Do you know what it does yet?” he asked. 

Hal thought about the little green ring tucked into a pair of socks, wrapped in a shirt, stuffed in the corner of his bag beneath everything else. 

“I have a general idea,” he said. It made green things and came with a weird uniform. That was certainly an idea of what it did: made his life weird(er). 

Bruce slanted a doubtful look at him. “Do you have control over what it does?” he rephrased. 

“Does anyone truly have control over this world?” Hal asked. 

“Yes,” said Bruce, having apparently reached enlightenment while on the run from the maybe government, maybe aliens. 

Hal scoffed. “What, do you think I’m some sort of dumbass who’d stick a magic space ring on my finger and treat it like a toy?” Even as he said it, he regretted it. 

“Yes,” said Bruce, having apparently abandoned enlightenment in favour of being an asshole. 

Hal sighed. Mostly because—alright, he had been tempted. More than tempted. 

“Fine,” he said, throwing his hands up. “I want to stick the magic space ring on my hand and treat it like a toy. Are you happy now?” 

“I’m never happy,” said Bruce. Not a muscle in his face moved for so long that Hal was violently reminded of Bruce’s initial serial killer vibes.

The corner of his flat mouth twitched. 

“You’re a jerk,” Hal said, trying not to show a fraction of the relief he felt, or that his heart was still racing. “That’s definitely not very cokemilk of you.” 

Bruce’s answering glare was a work of art. 

“Must you,” he said, entirely without inflection. 

“I absolutely must,” Hal said, and they fell into a comfortable silence.

They were on the road when Bruce, driving exactly at the speed limit, said over the drone of the radio, “You’ve been sleeping a lot.” 

Hal, head rattling against the window as their current car trundled faithfully along, couldn’t exactly argue the point, no matter how much he wanted to: even as Bruce had said it, he had been half-way to idly dozing off in the warmth of the car. 

“People sleep when they’re tired,” he said, eyes nearing half-open. They were open enough that he could see the way Bruce glanced over at him once, twice.

He was bone-tired these days, after spending his time worrying about kidnappings and murder and human experimentation. They really should be leaving the adventures to The Youth, he thought to himself. He imagined those kids from Bruce’s photos living like this—that young boy, the lanky teen, the grinning young man. Considered them fleeing, unmoored in the world, with only one person they knew was for sure not out to get them. 

The Youth should not be allowed adventures, he told himself.

A third glance from Bruce, and each one was slightly more worried than the last.

“What?” he asked, wearily.

Bruce frowned. Hal’s eyes drifted shut before he forced them open again. “You should not be this tired,” he said bluntly. “Hal. There’s something wrong.”

Christ. This, now? The sun was setting, the sky was beautifully on fire, and they had via The Internet (a marvellous invention) scoped out a place to stay that didn’t look like it would end with at least one of them dead or with Hal spending the night trying to destroy cockroaches. And he wanted to start scaremongering about their health now?

“You really need to work on your timing, dear,” Hal said. “Seriously. D for effort.”

Bruce scowled at the windscreen. “One of us needs to take this seriously,” he said.

“One of us does,” Hal bit out. “One of us is also realistic about what we can actually do.”

Bruce didn’t say anything to that, and Hal spent a while choking back bitter words and that was the end of it, for quite some time.

#

The next place they stopped at was familiar to them: it was one of Bruce’s “We need to double back” moments, which led them to pulling up at a place they had stayed at three nights ago, for a single night of Bruce feigning sleep while actually doing a marvellous AI impersonation as he listened for anything “out of the ordinary” (his words) which couldn’t include Hal talking in his sleep (Hal’s words).

“Woah,” Hal said at the sound of the knock. “Deja vu.” 

Bruce rolled his eyes and then instantly rolled into action, packing. Hal appreciated the terrifying level of readiness Bruce existed in at all times just as much as he was, well. Terrified by it. 

Sure, they were on the run and hiding from The Government, but did he really need to be so paranoid all the time? Briefly he tried to picture a Bruce who was not the way that he was. He failed miserably. 

“Seriously, babe,” he said, crossing the floor. “You know, someday you’re going to have to answer the door yourself. I’m not a butler or whatever it is rich people have. Robots, maybe.”

Bruce didn’t answer. There was another knock. Polite, firm. Hal forced his face into a polite smile he didn’t feel as he opened it. 

At least they knew how to run quickly. 

The man on the other side was tall, but he slouched in the doorframe, and his rumped clothes gave the impression of someone who desperately didn’t want to take up as much space as he did. He adjusted his glasses and smiled at them, open and friendly. But. 

There was something about this that set Hal on edge—something locked away in the abyss in his head that wouldn’t reply to him no matter how long he spent yelling into the void. He gritted his teeth and did his best not to hold his lack of memories against the world. It would be easy to make enemies that way, and he had a feeling—the same feeling that told him that this man’s bearing, no matter how natural, was all wrong—that he had plenty of enemies as it already stood.

The man adjusted his glasses as he spoke. “There you two are,” he said, relief evident and Hal let himself also feel relief as Bruce came to stand near him. “We’ve been worried.” 

“Sorry,” Bruce said, implacable. He didn’t sound sorry in the slightest. “I think you have the wrong people.” 

“Bruce, please,” the man said, removing his glasses. He held out both hands. “You know me. You’re probably a little confused right now, but I promise I’m not here to hurt either you or Hal.” 

Yet another person who knew the mystery Hal. 

Bruce didn’t move, and Hal was glad that one of them was rock-steady, because he was ready to follow The Plan and go climb out the bathroom window. But, given how many times they had dodged shadows, and the previous encounter—somehow he didn’t think that would really get them away from these people. 

“You haven’t even told us your name,” Bruce said. “And you expect us to trust you?” 

He shifted, almost imperceptible, but Hal was pressed next to his arm and could feel it. Could see the man notice it too.

That rumpled look was such a lie, but how embarrassed he was at Bruce pointing out his slip was honest. 

“Sorry,” he said. “We didn’t realise how badly it had affected you, and,” he laughed a little as he spoke. “I got too used to you apparently knowing everything.” 

Hal could believe that. He was glad that there was someone else out there who knew what it was like. 

“My name is Kal,” he said, and his shoulders straightened as he stood up properly out of that slouch and. Oh, there. That was what he was hiding. “Kal-El,” he was saying, and he smiled. “But most people—both of you—also know me as Superman.” 

Hal barked a laugh before he knew he was doing it. “What sort of name is that?” he asked.

Kal-El— _ Superman _ —grinned at him. 

“A name for an alien,” he said, and Hal punched Bruce’s arm. 

“See,” he hissed. “And you called me a conspiracy theorist.” 

He grinned at Superman. “He told me aliens weren’t real, but I believed,” he said, confidently. 

Superman looked amused. “Of course,” he said. 

He sounded like there was something hilarious about the whole situation, which Hal did not understand. 

Bruce huffed. “I didn’t say aliens didn’t exist,” he corrected. “I called you a conspiracy theorist for thinking they were behind everything.” 

He turned to face Kal-El. He didn’t relax. 

“Most of the people I’ve met have known who I am,” he said flatly. “You’re going to need more proof than just you knowing our names. Try again.” 

And with that he stepped back, pulling Hal with him, and closed the door on the alien’s face. 

Hal gaped at the door and then turned the disbelieving expression on Bruce, who was not even slightly swayed. 

“Bruce,” he said. “Bruce, babe. You just slammed a door on an alien’s face.” 

Bruce scoffed. “No,” he said. “I slammed the door on a liar. Really. You believed that?” he asked, before turning to the bed and shoving the last of their belongings in a bag. 

Hal watched him and turned a critical eye on the room. “Nothing left?”

“No,” Bruce said, not stopping his movements. “We have to go.” 

Hal considered this. “My turn to drive,” he said, and grabbed his own bag. 

There was a sudden gust of wind, strong enough to rattle the window and the door. 

“Doesn’t sound like a good start,” Hal said, consideringly as he shifted his bag on his shoulder. He wasn’t looking forward to fleeing in the dead of night during bad weather. It felt like a bad sign. 

But Bruce would make them run even if it sounded like a scene out of a horror movie, wouldn’t he? 

As Hal was contemplating the terrible things Bruce would do to them in the name of Safety (they were many and varied), there came another gust of wind. 

Stronger, this time. Strong enough to blow the door in, but maybe that was mostly because Superman was back, seeking vengeance on it and presumably them for offending him. 

On instinct, Hal grabbed the lamp. He didn’t think he’d really be able to hold off a powerful alien with a bedside lamp, but you never knew. Maybe lightbulbs were his Achilles’ heel. 

Bruce gave him a baffled glance before turning back to ‘Superman.’ 

He certainly was very tall. And strong-looking. And that uniform—oddly similar to Hal’s own weird thing—was definitely very blue. He smiled at them. 

“It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.” 

Hal held the lamp higher. “You have the wrong people,” he said, with a conviction he didn’t feel. 

“I really don’t,” Superman said with a small laugh. “Sleep, Hal. You’re going to be fine.” 

At that, there was a sharp prick in his arm, and he glanced down woozily to see a small dark in it. He threw his head to the side, with the energy he had left—already he was close to blacking out. He could see Bruce on his knees, gripping the side of the bed. There was a dart in his upper arm. 

“Oh,” Hal said slowly. “That was sneaky.” 

He could see Superman say something to him, but he didn’t know what it was, because that was when he finally blacked out. 

#

When he forced his eyes open, the world wasn’t spinning.

“Can you hear me?” someone asked. A man leaned over him, dark hair, blue eyes. He groaned.

“Wow, deja vu,” he said. Bruce didn’t laugh but Hal didn’t expect him to because you only expected Bruce to laugh when he was doing his weird little Real Human impersonation as Brucie. “What’s the verdict?”

The only part of Bruce’s stiffer than normal face that moved was his mouth, and Hal felt the embarrassment radiating off him acutely. “I believe you would call it—a space flu,” he said, grinding the last words out from between his teeth as if he couldn’t believe they would pass his well-read and well-spoken lips.

“The flu,” Hal repeated, disbelieving. “The  _ flu _ .”

Bruce sighed and sat down next to Hal’s bed. “Fatigue, headaches, aching muscles, fevers. Just in different intensity from what humans are used to. The memory problems were… unexpected.”

“We had the  _ flu _ ,” Hal repeated.

They had the flu and somehow that had ended up with them on the run together. Hal and Bruce. Wow. Well, it was certainly a new one for Hal, thinking he was dating Batman. Hopefully there were no assassins or thieves lurking in the shadows after that escapade, but Hal thought it would probably be best if he avoided Gotham for a while to lower the risk of black cats crossing his path.

Bruce rubbed his eyes, exhausted. “Yes, Hal,” he said, tired. “The flu.”

He didn’t seem to appreciate what a ridiculous situation it was, and so Hal helplessly repeated, “Flu.”

Bruce sighed and it was only after that sigh that it dawned on Hal that it was properly Bruce—cowl gone,  _ costume  _ gone, dark hair not perfectly in place. He looked not entirely dissimilar from how he seemed after a night of barely dozing and would then, in the morning, insist that he had slept. “We might have further symptoms,” he said. “Therefore, several more days of quarantine.”

Hal groaned at the idea. "God, why," he said. Bruce sighed in agreement, and Hal peered at him. "You look like you could use a coffee."

Bruce relaxed into the chair, a feat possible only by Batman, and maybe Superman on a good day. They were not chairs that had been designed to be functional as things people sat in for more than a couple of minutes. They were more of a “sit down for thirty seconds, offer sympathies on poor luck and commiserate before swiftly moving on” type chair. Hal was unfortunately very well acquainted with them.

“Coffee,” Bruce said to himself. “Coffee sounds good.”

He didn’t move to get anything, and the way his eyes drifted across to the door could almost be described as “wistful,” if someone felt that they could ever describe Batman as being a wistful sort of person.

“Oh no,” said Hal. “No, they wouldn’t—”

“No stimulants,” Bruce said, nodding. His eyes slid closed briefly, before he put a stop to regular human functions and forced himself awake again.

“That is cruel and unusual,” Hal remarked.

Bruce quirked an eyebrow. “I’ll pass your critiques along,” he said dryly. “I’m sure Superman will be interested.”

Ugh. Threatening him with talks about health and safety—it was definitely Bruce, personality entirely intact. He grimaced, and let the topic drop.

Something occurred to him as he watched Bruce stake out a claim on a section of the room closest to him.

“So we’re not going to have to, uh,” he waved a hand between them to say “talk about this” and also maybe “exist near each other at any point for the next, say, ten years?” He thought he could maybe be over the embarrassment in ten years, if he was lucky.

Bruce took his meaning. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said with impressive mildness. “We were ill and confused. Of course as teammates we would rely on each other.”

Oh. Well. At least nothing had happened to Bruce’s “Jordan, how are you so smart and yet so like this” tone. In the week (or more? Time was a fickle friend who Hal did not fully understand right now) they had spent holed up together it had become even more familiar. And—yes, there it was. The slight twitch of an eyebrow that turned it from a Batman criticism to a “I am trying to be nice, this is how normal people do nice, right?”

“Cool,” said Hal, dropping his head against the pillows. “Because I have no clue how to explain anything about the whole serial killer thing now.”

Bruce scowled at him. “Kindly do not—” he started, before Hal cut him off.

“Of course I’m not going to tell people,” he said grumpily. Who would he even tell? The image of him trying to explain the mess to Nightwing popped into his head and he shook it harshly. No way that would go well. “Anyway,” he continued, frowning at Bruce suspiciously. “Are you supposed to be up?”

Bruce shifted slightly. Hal’s eyes narrowed. “I had some matters to attend to,” he said, meaning that he was absolutely supposed to still be in his bed and had resolutely refused to do what he was supposed to do.

There was a brief lull before he said, slightly awkwardly, “It was Alfred.” And then: “He asked after you.”

“After me?” It wasn’t as if Hal was the best of pals with Batman’s butler, no matter how (or perhaps, especially because of how) faintly terrifying he found the man. (See:  _ Batman’s butler. _ )

Bruce’s mouth was a flat line that said he was trying not to laugh. “I did vanish with you for ten days, Hal,” he said. Ten days could be an eternity.

“That’s true,” Hal said. “He pestering you to not leap back into work?”

Bruce slid further down into the chair. It was barely an inch, but Hal saw it and relished it. The sight of Bruce Wayne uncomfortable and being obvious about it was rare. 

“There was a reminder,” he said somewhat stiffly. “About the capabilities and limitations of the human body.” 

_ Well, that’s alright, then,  _ Hal didn’t say.  _ It’s not as if you’re human enough to have a human body, Spooky.  _ But that wasn’t really true, anymore. Hal didn’t know how he could—if he could—go back to joking about Bruce’s implausible humanity after those days. A few robot jokes had been made, sure. But he didn’t think you could ever see anything more horrifyingly human than an amnesiac Bruce. 

“He also wants me to pass on an invitation,” Bruce continued. 

He said nothing more. Hal stared at him blankly. 

“Okay?” Hal said. 

“The invitation is for you,” Bruce said at length. “For tea.”

“What,” said Hal.

“You have been invited to tea.” The grave tone with which Bruce spoke these words had Hal trying to recall everything Bruce had ever said, hinted, or implied about Alfred, in case “invited for tea” was in actual fact a euphemism for, say, “invited to be a human sacrifice in a bizarre British ritual, after which you will never be seen again.” Bruce watched him, the hint of expectation working its way into the lines of his face. 

“Uh—,” Hal garbled. “I accept?”

Bruce nodded once. “Good,” he said. “Next Friday was suggested. Alfred does not like lateness, but will make an exception if there is an emergency.” 

“How can I be late if you haven’t given me a time?” Hal asked, briefly concerned for his short term memory again. 

Bruce frowned at him. “It’s for tea,” he said, as if that would make it any clearer.

“Yes, I got that part,” Hal agreed. “You said that. I will have tea with your scary butler. What time should I be there?” 

“Alfred isn’t scary,” Bruce objected. “You’re a Green Lantern.” 

“Yeah, I am, and yeah, he is,” Hal said. “There are degrees of scariness.” 

This was ridiculous. He just wanted to know—

“You don’t feel fear,” Bruce told him, as if Hal were unaware of this fact about himself. “You have in the past made quite a big deal out of that.” 

“Hey,” Hal said. “Things can be scary without me being afraid. Batman’s butler is definitely scary.” 

“You are afraid of Alfred,” Bruce repeated. He rocked the chair back on two legs, and his head disappeared from Hal’s view. 

Hal craned his head to the side to look at him. “Even I have common sense,” he said. 

Bruce scoffed, and let the chair fall forward again, using the momentum of it to help him to his feet. 

“Well,” he said. “That’s not very cokemilk of you, babe.” 

And as Hal gaped at him in shock, he turned and left the room, not looking back even when Hal regained his voice and shouted after him. 

“Not very—” Hal wheezed. “Oh my God. Oh my God, I’m going to kill him.”

He pulled a pillow from behind his head and screamed his frustration into it. And when that scream was over, he yelled again, as he realised that Bruce had walked away without telling him what time “tea” was supposed to mean.

**Author's Note:**

> have a cokemilk day, guys!


End file.
